Playing Straight With Gays

There’s no swish, no closet, no apology. The new 1998 model of gay man rolling out of the Hollywood factory is genuinely watershed--so psychologically intact that even straight women are buttonholing them to be fathers for their babies.

It’s been a long haul.

Gays have moved from invisible to tortured pervert to diseased victim. They’ve played Eve Arden, Camille and RuPaul acerbically quipping, suffering nobly or swishing royally. Now they’re certified husband material--if not yet to the boy next door, at least to the girl next door--unapologetically gay and the male lead of a major studio film for the first time.

In 20th Century Fox’s “The Object of My Affection,” which opened Friday, Paul Rudd is a dishy young openly gay hunk whom Jennifer Aniston falls in love with, and for all the right reasons: He’s charming, lovable, playful, emotionally accessible, vulnerable and a real friend. It’s as flattering and accurate a representation of an average gay man as Hollywood has gotten--and old news to many real-life Americans. To Aniston’s character, he’s a reasonable alternative as the father of her baby, when a suitable hetero is just not turning up.

“He’s the romantic lead, the one you fall in love with, he’s openly gay--and he’d also be a wonderful father,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who adapted the best-selling novel of Stephen McCauley’s “Object of My Affection” for the screen through a 10-year obstacle course. “I didn’t want to write a gay character as the best friend next door, constantly quoting musical comedies. It’s what they used to do with women, the best friend, who was always home. Then they started doing it to gay men.”

Lifetime cable channel airs an almost identical dynamic to its 71 million cable subscribers in “Labor of Love” in two weeks. This time, the couple is played by Marcia Gay Harden and David Marshall Grant, the acclaimed actors of Broadway’s “Angels in America.” Grant’s gay man is less modelish and more human, less buff and more fleshed out--down to an alcohol-addictive bent-- but every bit the catch, the romantic lead, and unapologetically gay.

The watershed shift this year owes its debt to last year’s watershed shift. Rupert Everett in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and Kevin Kline in “In & Out” were handsome, masculine, gay and center stage--though Kline was mostly in the closet and asexual, and Everett was the sidekick rather than lead. But still, showcased in farcical comedy--a still-accepted norm for tiptoeing through gay life--the films were the seventh and 22nd top-grossing domestic films of the year, emboldening Fox, Lifetime, MGM/UA, Disney, Sony, Trimark and New Line, among others, to test the waters (already navigated by smaller independent distributors like Strand Releasing).

While not yet openly waving the banner for gay equality next to the Hollywood sign, studios are taking the plunge with prominent, and positive, gay characters in upcoming big-budget films in unprecedented numbers.

Not surprisingly, the sequel to “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is already in development at Columbia, where Ron Bass is shaping the script to showcase the screen magic produced by Julia Roberts and the openly gay Everett. Top comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is also developing for MGM the sequel to its Robin Williams worldwide box-office hit, “The Birdcage”--hoping to contemporize the swishy queen humor with a dollop of topicality about the gay role in American politics. “Though never forsaking its drag roots,” promises Vilanch.

In New Line’s “Blast From the Past,” in development, Alicia Silverstone’s best friend and roommate is openly gay. And Everett has finished a comedy screenplay, “Martha and Arthur,” about a marriage of convenience between a gay man and heterosexual woman, and has been approached to write and is currently shaping a “a gay James Bond” thriller--but where the sexuality is incidental to the plot.

Rick Leed, the openly gay president of Wind Dancer, the Disney-based production company that produces “Home Improvement,” says: “There’s willingness to seeing gay men the way they really exist--not only drag queens or hairdressers. Not ‘Priscilla,’ not ‘Birdcage,’ not ‘Philadelphia,’ but on every cultural level.”

Blaise Noto, the openly gay head of worldwide publicity for Paramount Pictures, sums up the collective sentiment for many gay men: “It’s just kind of nice that gay characters are becoming normal.” And Laura Kim, a publicist at the Pogachevsky Co., which has to strategize every angle to hawk small gay-themed films within a sea of hetero mainstream fare, offers her own version of the recent past: “Bitchy, snappy, winky, queeny . . . that’s what we’ve been seeing for years. Gay characters used to always have some sort of evilness, sinister, something always wrong. It’s finally getting healthier.”

In fairness to Hollywood, films don’t lead, they mirror. Hollywood is homophobic because America has been homophobic. And the films are changing because America is changing.

Thirty years ago, “The Boys in the Band,” first as a Broadway play, then as a landmark film, was hailed in gay circles for finally putting gay men center stage. They were witty, charming, possibly even masculine and potentially monogamous. They were also almost universally self-loathing--but so were gay men back then.

“When you get an attitude from society which tells you that the American Medical Assn. is against you, and it’s on the books that you’re suffering from a mental illness, and when your religion of choice, whether it’s Judaism or Christianity, tells you that the Bible says this is an abomination, and this is drilled into you by your parents who disapprove, society who disapproves, and even your doctor who disapproves,” says playwright Mart Crowley, “then you think that there’s something wrong with you, and that you want to try to get it fixed.”

Thirty years of gay lib has changed everybody: gay men over 40 who have lived through it; their families, friends and society around them; and the younger generation of gays who have come of age in a more tolerant society. And over the last few years, television shows such as “Roseanne,” “Ellen” and “Melrose Place” paved the way for films they began presenting more realistic gay characters.

“Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss,” one of this year’s Sundance hits that opens nationally this summer, was written and directed by the twentysomething Tommy O’Haver--and it shows: The openly gay characters are totally unself-conscious, like their offscreen counterparts, as they pursue love, lust and friendships in an untortured universe of gays and straights that crosses Pedro Almodovar with Woody Allen, and adds gay camp.

Already rolling out on regional screens is “I Think I Do”--the catch-phrase is “a gay ‘Big Chill’ “--in which another group of twentysomething straights and gays from college reunite at a wedding years later, and two men, one of whom was obsessed with the other, then in the closet, finally get together. The only outrage over sexual orientation is disappointment from the thwarted pursuer.

And in “The Hanging Garden,” the Canadian multi-award winner that MGM is releasing in American theaters beginning May 8, a gay man with a closeted, tortured childhood returns home to his small town. He’s now out of the closet, and unapologetic.

The older generation is also presented on screen as benefiting from gay lib. In the current “Love and Death on Long Island,” the fiftysomething John Hurt plays a British author who becomes enamored with a young American pulp actor, played by Jason Priestley, and comes to America to unabashedly pursue him. Hurt starts off confused but quickly metamorphoses into an advocate for following one’s heart, romantically and professionally.

But independent films, unlike the studios, have been pushing the envelope for years. “Look at ‘My Beautiful Laundrette.’ That was made 10 years ago, with a completely accepting view of gay relationships,” veteran film critic and author Molly Haskell points out. “Independents have been far ahead in dealing with gay characters. But for mainstream big-budget studio movies, this is a fairly hip development.”

Films like “Labor of Love,” “Object of My Affection,” “I Think I Do” and “Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss” reflect an even larger cultural reality than the normalizing of gays. After three decades of liberation for women and other groups, a widespread reality that already exists in mainstream American life is finally creeping to the screen: Family units are no longer defined by blood ties, marriage or heterosexually.

“This is saying how we live our lives now,” says Wasserstein. “What I love is the pan shot of those people [in ‘Object of My Affection’]. The child has all these people around, Uncle Paul and Uncle George and Aunt Constance and Uncle Rodney, an extended nuclear family. The old grid doesn’t hold. It’s a different form of family.”

And movies are catching another new zeitgeist in the air: Family is no longer an obscene word for gay men.

“Twenty years ago, the outlaw status of homosexuality was in some ways very oppressive. One of the great forces of that oppression were people’s own families. Many people felt that families had really hurt them. So a family was a thing that people didn’t want to be a part of,” explains Ron Nyswaner, the gay screenwriter whose groundbreaking script for “Philadelphia” was Oscar-nominated.

“But everyone has changed, even in the past five years, and it’s not as difficult to come out to the family. Now it seems more inviting to be part of a family. Now we don’t have to define ourselves as ‘the people who don’t have anything to do with families.’ ”

But for now, the roadblock still stops at gay-gay parenthood. “Labor and Love” and “Object of My Affection” mix a gay man with a straight woman. For David Marshall Grant, himself openly gay, it’s a start, and the reason he took the part. He says: “That’s still the firewall, the line in the sand where society draws the line. We can accept gay people, we can enjoy them, we can laugh with them, but they are not going to be legitimized as family units, as parents,” says Grant, who calls the line “very destructive and very artificial.” “That my character wants to cross that line is extremely important to me, and why I wanted to do the movie.”

Gay activists like Larry Kramer, the “Normal Heart” playwright, refuse to congratulate Hollywood when it’s still diluting images of gay men. “I have yet to see what I would call a really gay character on the screen. A real live gay man who is full of flesh and blood.” The closest, he says, was Rupert Everett--”and that’s damning by faint praise.” He calls Greg Kinnear’s gay character in “As Good As It Gets” “a joke, a total victim, a wimp,” and Kevin Kline’s schoolteacher “a one-dimensional cartoon--though I don’t think they pretended it was anything different.”

“I’m still waiting for the major gay love story in which two big male stars like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon have a really hot love affair,” says Kramer. “And I’m here to tell you that that movie is going to make a fortune.”

Lower-key activists like Wind Dancer’s Rick Leed, who as an agent at Agency for Performing Arts unsuccessfully tried to set up “Labor of Love” as a feature project almost 10 years ago, just want to see gay men like themselves on screen.

“I’m a gay father, a working professional, and most of the characters on film and television and theater have little resemblance to me, or to most of the gay people I know.”

Which is why Nyswaner has hesitated to write a gay-peopled screenplay the past several years. “The script that I want to write, that I fantasize about, is where the main character is gay, and it has nothing to do with homosexuality,” says Nyswaner, who understands the conservative machinery of Hollywood. “I’ve been struggling with just how to do it.”

But there’s widespread optimism. Nyswaner’s take: “I absolutely know that we’re moving in the direction to that great day when a gay main character is in the movie, and he’s a detective solving a murder, or he’s an explorer discovering some planet in outer space, and he comes home to his lover, and nothing with the ‘h’ word is mentioned throughout the entire movie.”